]]>How can you make Wikipedia more attractive to the YouTube generation? Wikipedians have struggled with this question for years, but efforts to add more moving images to the popular only encyclopedia have yet to take off: Only 0.12 percent of all Wikipedia articles contain a video, according to Jesse de Vos from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, which itself is a major contributor of videos to Wikipedia. “With video on Wikimedia we are still just scratching the surface,” de Vos wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has uploaded a total of 3,800 videos to Wikimedia Commons, the media repository for Wikipedia. This accounts for close to eight percent of all Wikimedia videos, according to de Vos, which makes the institute the largest single contributor of videos to Wikimedia. Video only accounts for 0.22 percent of all files on Wikimedia, and only around 5,800 articles on the English-language Wikipedia site contain videos.

However, adding video to Wikipedia isn’t actually that easy. One major issue is copyright, which prevents many public institutions from adding media to the project. Said de Vos:

Very few archives own all the rights to their audiovisual collections. And because multiple creators are almost intrinsic to the production of audio-visual material, it proves very challenging to find out the legal status of a work, let alone obtain the permission required from all rights holders involved.

For individuals, there could be one additional roadblock: Wikipedia only accepts videos encoded in WebM or Ogg Vorbis, which means that users first have to transcode videos before uploading them to the site. The Wikimedia foundation briefly discussed supporting MP4 earlier this year, but eventually decided against the format.

]]>The Wikimedia Foundation has tried for years to bring more videos to Wikipedia. But despite those efforts, only 38,000 video files have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, which is essentially Wikipedia’s media library. That’s next to nothing, considering that the English-language version of Wikipedia has more than 4.4 million articles alone.

Now, Wikimedia is considering a drastic step to boost the number of videos on Wikipedia: It may abandon its open source principles and add support for the H.264 video codec, which is the de facto standard for video on the web, but commercially licensed by patent pool outlet MPEG LA.

Until now, Wikimedia has only allowed uploads of videos encoded in Ogg Theora or WebM, both of which are open and royalty-free. However, this could soon change. The Wikimedia foundation officially launched a “request for comment” (RFC) Wednesday, asking its community of contributors for input on the question whether it should allow H.264.

The RFC reads, in part:

“Video is used widely for educational purposes on the Internet. Online videos can be an effective learning tool, particularly for people who cannot read well. However, video is not widely used on Wikimedia projects. To date, only 38,000 video files have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons — about 0.2% of the 19 million other media files in our repository (by contrast, YouTube now hosts over 6.5 million educational videos).”

The document notes that the two formats currently used come with a number of downsides. For one not every browser supports WebM and Ogg Theora. Users of Safari and Internet Explorer in particular are left in the cold. What’s worse, a larger number of mobile devices currently offers no support:

“Once created, these files cannot be viewed on over two-thirds of mobile devices using Wikimedia sites — and most videos recorded on mobile devices cannot be directly uploaded to our sites. This is particularly concerning because mobile use of Wikimedia sites is already large (33% of total pageviews last month) and growing rapidly.”

The Wikimedia foundation has traditionally had a very strict stance on open media formats. For example, Wikimedia doesn’t allow the upload of MP3 files because of patent and licensing issues. However, in light of the failure to bring video to Wikipedia, the foundation is apparently ready for a change of tune. A proposal under consideration would lead to every file automatically being transcoded, so that Wikipedia would be able to service up WebM version when supported, and fall back to MP4 for users visiting the site with devices or browsers that don’t support open formats.

However, there is also dissent. Again, from the RFC:

“MP4 opponents consider our free software goals and ideals to be as important as our educational mission, at least as far as video is concerned. They view MP4 support as a fundamental shift in our values — and a major setback for the open and free software movements. They are prepared to stick with the current status quo, even if this means that millions of users are unable to view or contribute MP4 video content on our sites.”

]]>Wikidata, a centralized structured data repository for facts and Wikimedia’s first big new project in the last 7 years, is now feeding the foundation’s main project, Wikipedia.

The Wikidata project was kicked off around a year ago by the German chapter of Wikimedia, which is still steering its gradual development. For Wikipedia, the advantage is simple and powerful — if there’s a central, machine-readable source for facts, such as the population of a city, then any update to that data can be instantly reflected across all the articles in which the facts are included.

To posit a morbid example: a singer may have dozens or even hundreds of language versions of her Wikipedia entry and, if she were to die, the addition of a date of death to the Wikidata database would immediately propagate across all those versions, with no need to manually update each one (yes, I can also see how this might go horribly wrong).

But the really interesting thing with Wikidata is that it’s not just for Wikipedia – although it’s worth remembering that its API is still under development, the database can be used by anyone as it is published under a Creative Commons 0 public domain dedication. Here’s how Wikidata project director Denny Vrande?i? put it in a statement:

“It is the goal of Wikidata to collect the world’s complex knowledge in a structured manner so that anybody can benefit from it, whether that’s readers of Wikipedia who are able to be up to date about certain facts or engineers who can use this data to create new products that improve the way we access knowledge.”

There are already some pretty cool (if bare-bones) examples of what people can do with Wikidata. One is GeniaWiki, which is trying to map the family relationships between famous people (the first and so far only example is that of the Bach family), while a Tree of Life project is trying to put together a viable, Wikidata-based “taxonomy of all life”.

It’s worth noting that the initial funding for Wikidata’s development has come from Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Ultimately, Wikidata is precisely the sort of venture that is needed to feed the nascent semantic web and AI movement.

It’s far from the only venture in this space – I’d also recommend keeping a close eye on Google’s Knowledge Graph, which powers Google Now, and Wolfram|Alpha, which partly powers Siri – but all these (often intertwined) projects are essentially trying to do the same thing: to turn facts into something that machines can understand.

And that, in conjunction with advances in natural language processing and machine learning, will ultimately help us converse with machines. These are the building blocks of artificial intelligence and the future of search, and Wikidata’s very permissive license should act as an open invitation to anyone dabbling in this space.

]]>It’s been a long time coming, but Wikipedia might finally be ready to embrace online video. The Wikimedia Foundation said Thursday morning that it is deploying a new video player that will make it easier to add videos to the millions of articles on Wikipedia. The player is based on technology from video platform provider Kaltura, which first partnered with Wikipedia in 2008. It allows users to add captions to their videos and utilizes the WebM video format that was open sourced by Google in 2010.

So why did it take Wikipedia so long to get videos on its site? It faced a number of unique challenges: First of all, Wikipedia doesn’t rely on outside hosting for any of its media, which means that it needs a robust video hosting infrastructure.

But the site’s commitment to open codecs and standards has also slowed down its adoption of video. Wikimedia originally only used Ogg Theora-encoded videos, which significantly limited its reach. The video codec was open source, but had limited support. The open sourcing of WebM through Google in 2010 offered a more widely supported alternative: Firefox, Chrome and Opera all are capable of natively playing WebM-encoded video content, and mobile devices are starting to embrace WebM as well.

The final challenge may be more of a cultural nature, and we will have to wait and see whether a new video player will really be able to address it. Wikipedia has been largely text-based, with a complex collaborative editing process and a large community that helps to maintain the site. Video on the other hand is much harder to edit in the way users can edit a text entry on Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation wants to use collaborative video editing tools developed by Kaltura to help bridge that gap. From the announcement blog post for the new video player:

“On the internet, video is a static medium: it rarely changes once uploaded. In contrast, the success of Wikipedia relies on numerous volunteers constantly editing and improving each other’s contributions. Appropriate tools will hopefully reduce this dissonance, like Kaltura’s sequencer, which empowers users to remix videos directly online. Successfully translating its radically collaborative nature to multimedia content will be critical to Wikipedia’s transition into the age of video.”

One editor for the site agreed, saying the blackout (which only affects the English portion of the site, and doesn’t affect the mobile version at all) put Wikipedia on “slippery slope,” which could force it to consider protests for all kinds of public issues. “Before we know it, we’re blacked out because we want to save the whales,” Robert Lawton told the Associated Press. Other users and contributors said they were concerned by taking a position on a specific issue, Wikipedia might call into question its neutral position on other things.

]]>Open source video platform provider Kaltura launched a new site called HTML5Video.org today that is meant to be an industry resource for HTML5 video-related issues. The site is supported by Mozilla, the Open Video Alliance and the Wikimedia Foundation. The launch coincides with the release of Kaltura’s HTML5 Media Library, which enables web site owners to embed videos in their sites through HTML5 without locking out users of older browsers that don’t support Flash-free web video just yet.

The HTML5 Media Library uses a fallback mechanism to play media through a Java application in browsers that don’t natively support HTML5 video. Kaltura plans to extend the library to also support analytics and monetization — two very important features that have so far prevented many sites from fully adopting HTML5. YouTube, for example, has been toying with HTML5 in recent months, enabling users to watch a subset of the site’s content without Flash after opting into a special TestTube trial. However, videos with ads are always shown in Flash. Sites like YouTube could at least in theory completely ditch Flash if HTML5 video was embraced by advertisers.

The unveiling of HTML5Video.org comes only one day after the launch of another site promoting HTML5 video to end users. Videoonwikipedia.org, which was launched yesterday by the Participatory Culture Foundation with support from Kaltura and others also involved with HTML5Video.org, wants to get users to contribute more video to Wikipedia. HTML5Video.org, on the other hand, seems much more geared toward professionals, offering business headlines as well as a link to a forum hosted by Kaltura’s open source video developer community at Kaltura.org.

Speaking of which: HTML5Video.org is heavily branded by and geared towards the solutions available from Kaltura. One has to wonder whether this will help or hurt their effort to gather support for an open format that just this week received support from industry heavyweights like Microsoft.

The main idea behind the site is obviously to enrich Wikipedia, which currently doesn’t feature many articles with videos, but the Participatory Culture Foundation also sees this as a chance to showcase HTML5 video and the open video codec Ogg Theora. “Wikipedia is the most popular site in the world that posts video exclusively in open formats,” the organization’s co-founder Nicholas Reville wrote in a blog post, adding: “By encouraging more people to post videos in Wikipedia articles, we can bring theora video played in html5 to a very large audience.”

The new site offers its users a quick and very basic step-by-step guide for posting videos on Wikipedia, which includes converting them to Ogg Theora, signing up for a Wikipedia account and enabling video upload capabilities on the site.

The Participatory Culture Foundation aims to simplify the encoding and converting issues with a new and as of yet unannounced tool dubbed the Miro Video Converter. Users of the converter can simply select Theora as the output format of choice, drop a video file onto the application and wait for the file in question to be converted.

Video on Wikipedia has been a long time coming, with the Wikimedia Foundation announcing plans to embrace video in early 2008. However, the site’s strong commitment to open formats has somewhat slowed down the adoption process, as it took a while until browsers capable of playing Flash-free video via HTML5 became available.

However, part of the delay apparently has also to do with internal issues, as representatives from Wikimedia and its technology partner Kaltura told me earlier this year. Kaltura’s VP of Business and Community Development Shay David said back then that Wikipedia editors took a while to get comfortable with video. “People needed to understand that video is an important aspect of Wikipedia,” he told me, adding: “That needed some time.”

]]>This week, it almost happened. The servers hosting all of Wikipedia’s media were ready to burst, filled up to the max with almost six million files totaling close to eight terabytes of data. Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, was able to install a new server with tons of new space just in time this Tuesday, but Wikimedia’s deputy director Eric Moeller admitted in a blog post: “It’s been a much closer call this time than we would like.”

Part of the reason why Wikimedia has to deal with a huge influx of data is that volunteers are increasingly uploading videos, and content partnerships with museums and archives have brought in hundreds of hours of additional footage. Wikimedia announced two years ago already that it was getting ready to include more of this content into Wikipedia. Little of this has materialized so far, but now it finally seems like video on Wikipedia is actually going to happen soon. So how is the free encyclopedia going to use moving images, and why has this taken so long?

Wikimedia announced a partnership with open source video platform provider Kaltura to get Wikipedia fit for video in early 2008. However, two years later, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any video clips on the site. I got in touch with both Kaltura and Wikimedia in recent days to figure out what happened. Both partners told me that they’re still very much in the process of making video on Wikipedia happen. It’s just that this process has been taking a little longer.

Much of the delay has to to with a mixture of technical and licensing issues. “We don’t work with proprietary video systems,” explained Wikimedia’s Head of Communications Jay Walsh when I talked to him this week. It was clear early on that Wikimedia wouldn’t use Flash or any other proprietary technology for video, which is why HTML5, with its capability to play video straight in your browser, was the obvious choice. However, the implementation wasn’t just a question of plug-ins, but also of codecs. Wikimedia decided to use the license-free, open source codec Ogg Theora, which didn’t natively play back in most browsers two years ago. In fact, even Firefox only started to support Ogg video playback with version 3.5, which was released last summer.

Wikipedia’s collective structure has been another reason for the delay. The site is ruled by consensus, and its tens of thousands of volunteers need to be on board with any major changes, which is one of the reasons why Wikipedia’s basic look and functionality have remained the same over the years. Walsh assured me that “Wikipedians are thrilled” about the possibilities of including video on their site, but Kaltura VP of Business and Community Development Shay David said that this hasn’t always been the case. “People needed to understand that video is an important aspect of Wikipedia,” he told me, adding: “That needed some time.”

Finally, Wikimedia also needed to figure out how to actually make the transition towards video work. “We are not Flickr, we are not YouTube,” cautioned Walsh. “We need to grow intelligently.” The organization needed to figure out how to encourage collaboration in the video space without becoming a repository for everyone’s vacation videos, and at the same time improve the usability of its video hosting. Part of this has been to come up with new uploading tools that make it easier to submit and tag media. The gathering of meta-data is especially important to make video work across Wikipedia’s various international editions as well as Wikimedia’s other sites. “It needs a lot of information attached to it,” said Walsh.

Kaltura’s video playback and editing tools are another important part of the puzzle. The company has developed an HTML5 video player that can be embedded into third-part websites. It will be substituted with a Java-based player for browsers that don’t support HTML5 yet. Kaltura has also developed encoding and uploading tools as well as a web-based video editing suite that will eventually make it possible for Wikipedia users to edit clips on Wikipedia in very much the same way they now can edit the site’s articles.

Walsh told me that we’ll finally see at least some of this functionality through a wider roll-out of video on Wikipedia within the next three to six months — provided, of course, that Wikimedia’s servers can handle it.

]]>The Wikimedia Foundation has picked up $3 million in grants from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The philanthropy will parcel out its grant in $1 million installments over three years to the non-profit group that runs Wikipedia. The proceeds will be used to support Wikimedia’s hiring and development. Sue Gardner, the new executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, noted that the organization has always existed on a shoestring; the constant reliance on small donations has made it difficult to pursue partnerships, execute projects, and, as a corollary, effectively raise funding.

The grant comes as Wikimedia has been struggling to build the organization — it just relocated to San Francisco and upped its staff from 10 to 15 — and amidst controversy about its co-founder and trustee Jimmy Wales. Among the projects which will be supported with the Sloan grant: a software feature called Flagged Revisions, which will let experienced editors assign public grades to postings – which Wikimedia likens to “nutrition labeling” for Wikipedia content. Later on, Wikimedia wants to expand outreach events such as Wikipedia Academy, which is aimed making contributors out of academics, senior citizens, and other targeted groups. It also plans to use the money to distribute Wikipedia content via non-web-based formats such as DVDs and books.